I. Field
The present disclosure pertains to high throughput screening of antibodies. More specifically, the disclosure relates to the use of multiple antibody libraries in simultaneous screening of antibodies using yeast display technology.
II. Description of Related Art
Traditionally, monoclonal antibodies are prepared using antibodies obtained from animal immunizations. However, developing therapeutic antibodies from animal immunizations requires humanizing the non-human antibodies or utilizing transgenic animals expressing human antibodies. Direct selection of fully human antibodies from pre-established antibody libraries or affinity maturation of humanized antibodies by in vitro display technologies offers a valuable alternative approach.
Among in vitro display technologies that have been developed, yeast surface display of antibody fragments has proven to be a robust technology for engineering therapeutic antibodies. Not only does yeast display provide exquisite selection power to enrich high affinity antigen binders, its capability to quantitatively select for antibodies of different binding kinetics by fluorescence activated sorting of the yeast cells is also more advantageous than other in vitro display technologies.
U.S. Patent Publication No. 2011/0076752 and U.S. Patent Publication No. 2011/0076752 describe methods for displaying recombinant whole immunoglobulins or immunoglobulin libraries on the surface of eukaryotic cells and methods for screening the libraries to identify immunoglobulins that are specific for an antigen of interest. Although significant progress has been made in enhancing the throughput of the yeast display technology, major obstacles remain because of the relatively low transformation efficiency in yeast and the potential loss of productivity due to library cross-contamination.